In an environment that includes application servers, request processing has typically been completed in a serialized manner, where requests are received at a request receiving component, and placed in a particular queue based on system constraints. The request processing component would typically determine the priority of a request, enqueue the request, manage a pool of threads that execute the request, and maintain a request load as defined by the constraints. However, the functionality of the request processing component is protected by a synchronization lock, making the state transitions of the request processing component serializable. Serialization is a blocking property, and under high contention is a performance bottleneck. These are the areas that embodiments of the invention are intended to address.